views:

2338

answers:

12

There are plenty of different Add-Ins for Visual Studio, see Visual Studio Gallery . Please share your experiences and favorites.

As motivation, here are some of my favorites:

Tools

For coffe break

  • Powder Toy [F] - build thrilling simulations yourself,
  • OE-CAKE [F/C] - build fluid simulations yourself.

Your suggestions:


[F] - freeware, [O] - open source, [C] - commercial.

+6  A: 

ViEmu is my personal favorite. Emulates VI right inside of VS. :^)

j0rd4n
+6  A: 

BTW, this post is essentially the same thing.

j0rd4n
+18  A: 

I'm amazed that Visual Assist has not been mentioned yet!

Johann Gerell
Visual Studio is not the same without this plug-in. I cannot live without it!
Nailer
+1  A: 

assist is very useful, visual lint is good but boring.

Deff
+2  A: 

VSFileExplorer is a nice file explorer for VS. It's also very helpful when used together with subversion/tortoiseSVN, since it displays the tortoise overlay icons within VS.

and of course

GhostDoc for generation of XML doc comments for methods, properties, classes, ...

M4N
+1  A: 
  • Visual assist X
  • P/Invoke
  • Refactor!
PoweRoy
+1  A: 

A minor one by me: Linkify that simplifies links in comments to dev wiki, msdn, bug tracker etc.

peterchen
+2  A: 

Is nobody using Resharper? - Shame on you! ;-)

Seriously, you don't know what you're missing (I do, because I've yet to convince my boss to buy it, and my evaluation period has expired)

The addition of this tool to visual studio almost brings it up to the level of IntelliJ Idea for Java

belugabob
ReSharper is offtopic here :) Useful Add-Ins or Plug-Ins for __native__ Visual Studio developer.
Pavel Minaev
Not quite sure how Resharper doesn't qualify as an add-in or plug-in - or how using any such program can maintain the _native_ nature of Visual Studio ? Each to his own, I suppose.
belugabob
Native in the context of this question appears to mean un-managed. As in C/C++ and not C#.
sean e
A: 

My two pennies worth: TabStudio and RockScroll.

Tab Studio is uber-awesome when working on WPF / Silverlight apps, trying to keep track of any number of code behind, view-model and xaml files.

Rock scroll is great for larger files and quickly finding references.

Mark Cooper
+2  A: 

RockScroll is awesome, but there is something more powerful: MetalScroll :)

btw... I also recommend this patch: http://code.google.com/p/metalscroll/issues/detail?id=9

noisy
Thanks! I replaced RockScroll with MetalScroll after reading this answer. A number of features improvements and better stability. I would recommend anyone to do the same.
Dani van der Meer
+1  A: 

Welcome to a new world! :o :D

mefepe
+2  A: 

vscommands free and awesome!

margal